Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows denied reports on Sunday that US Postal Service letter sorting machines have been taken offline and decommissioned ahead of the 2020 election, and challenged State of the Union host Jake Tapper to tell him where they had been taken offline, calling it a Democratic lie.
Said Meadows: “Get your producer to share where exactly those sorting machines were taken offline. Let them whisper in your ear because what I'm telling you is you're picking up on a narrative that's not based on facts.”
Tapper later in the interview told Meadows that a postal official in Kansas and Missouri told CNN that “postal management has already taken out four machines in Kansas City, two machines in Springfield, Missouri, and one machine in Wichita, Kansas earlier this year under this new postmaster general.”
The revelation sent Meadows into a tizzy and he changed his tune, telling Tapper the decommissioning of the machines is part of “a normal system of changing it out.”
“With all due respect and if we look at it, I can talk to Kansas, I can talk to Tucson, Arizona,” said Meadows. “You're talking to someone who knows, it's when we take out those processing, they're part of a processing center that comes in. And as we start to move those out, if they were not part of an already scheduled reallocation, it's not happening. It's not a new initiative by this postmaster general. And when we look at this, it's all about efficiency but you have a normal system of changing it out. And so with all due respect of your fact checker, I'll be glad to come in. We can spend an hour talking about this. We'll bore people to death. The post office has been losing money for over ten years. … This president is serious about fixing it. Louis DeJoy (the Trump loyalist postmaster general) is serious about fixing it.”
After Tapper presents receipts that mail sorting machines are indeed being taken offline, Meadows suddenly changes his tune and says it's part of “a normal system of changing it out.” (Earlier, Meadows flatly denied that mail sorting machines were being taken offline at all!) pic.twitter.com/PwdFNKT7JG
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 16, 2020
When Meadows tried to put forth a voter fraud argument with Tapper, Tapper explained that “there's no evidence of widespread voter fraud.”
Replied Meadows: “There's no evidence that there's not either.”
JAKE TAPPER: “There's no evidence of widespread voter fraud.”
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 16, 2020
MARK MEADOWS: “There's no evidence that there's not either.” pic.twitter.com/TbBXRPjd9S
